CLOSED Call for Papers: Special Issue on Safety, Security, and Reliability of Autonomous Vehicle Software

Autonomous vehicles are becoming ubiquitous and having a greater impact on our everyday life. The advanced knowledge in system dynamics, breakthroughs in computer vision, and availability of new sensor modalities have accelerated academic research and industrial deployment. A dependable and reliable autonomous driving system may be a solution to not only reduce the number of accidents, but also minimize driving-related human stress. The annual social benefits of adopting autonomous driving are projected to reach nearly $800 billion by 2050 through congestion mitigation, road casualty reduction, decreased energy consumption, etc.

However, recent fatal accidents, due to the application of immature and unreliable autonomous vehicle software, have undermined our trust in these systems. In response, we must improve their safety, security, and reliability, which are of the utmost importance but a lofty goal to achieve. The challenges are two-fold. On one hand, autonomous vehicle software has to deal with highly dynamic and volatile environments. On the other hand, it has to handle increasingly intelligent work, including interacting with and continuously learning from their environments using machine visions, motion sensors, image and voice recognition, and artificial intelligence.

This special issue solicits original work that makes important contributions to ensure the safety, security, and reliability of autonomous vehicle software. All submitted papers are to focus on state-of-the-art autonomous vehicle software development with consolidated and thoroughly evaluated application-oriented research results from various academic and industry viewpoints. The topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following work on autonomous vehicle software:

• Vulnerability assessment, risk and reliability analysis, and attack and threat models
• Safe design, development, and program synthesis
• Availability, resiliency, and fault tolerance
• Testing, verification, and validation
• Methodologies and metrics for quality assurance
• Forensics, events monitoring, and auditing
• Standardization, certification, and interoperability
• Security of vehicular operating systems
• Industry experiences, best practices, empirical studies, testbeds, and tool supports

Important Dates

Submissions due: December 18, 2020

Preliminary notification: March 7, 2021

Revisions due: April 2, 2021

Final notification: May 7, 2021

Final version due: May 21, 2021

Publication: August 2021

Submission Guidelines

All submissions should follow the magazine submission guidelines, follow the template provided by Computer magazine, and consist of the following:

• A manuscript of 6,000 words maximum: A PDF of the complete manuscript layout with figures and tables placed within the text. Each figure and table is counted as 300 words.
• A source file in Word or Latex format.
• High-resolution photos and graphics such as JPEG files. These are required for the final submission.

Manuscripts should not be published or currently submitted for publication elsewhere. Articles that have been previously published at a conference need to have at least 30% new material.

Manuscripts need to be submitted online at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/cs-ieee. Select this special-issue option in Step 1 of the submission process to ensure that the article is reviewed for this special issue.

Questions?

Contact the guest editors at co8-21@computer.org.

Guest editors:

• W. Eric Wong, University of Texas at Dallas, USA
• Zijiang Yang, Western Michigan University and GuardStrike Inc., USA